Backing up your photos to the cloud is becoming an increasingly viable option as storage costs drop, bandwidth speeds up, and more devices go wireless. I have an overview of a number of options here. Now one of the biggest players in cloud services has added interesting new options.

Amazon has recently modified the way it counts photos in Amazon Cloud Drive. You have always been able to upload photos, as you could with most other kinds of files. But they were treated like any other file when it came to measuring how much storage space you were using. Amazon Prime accounts start with 5GB, which isn't a lot when it's being used for videos, photos, and any other files you're storing online.

Now Amazon has changed it to unlimited storage space for your photos and has branded it as Prime Photos. What that means is that standard image files in formats like JPG no longer count towards your overall storage quota. When you look up your storage usage on your account, photos are separated out in a special unlimited section. (Video files are still counted against your quota.) It's pitched as secure online storage for your photos, accessible from almost anywhere.

The change is one of the free features to Amazon Prime membership alongside Prime Music, Prime Instant Video, the Kindle Lending Library, and the reason many members pay their annual membership fee: free 2-day shipping.

Since its initial rollout, Amazon modified its Amazon Cloud Drive plans and pricing structure and provided a way to extend it to other files as well.

The Unlimited Photos plan, which is free with Prime membership, has unlimited storage for photos in addition to 5GB for videos and other file types. If you don't have a Prime membership, you can purchase the Unlimited Photos plan separately. There's also a new Unlimited Everything plan for photos, videos, files, and documents. Both have a 3-month trial. You can find more information here. And if you're a student, Amazon Prime also offers a special 50% off rate for student membership with a 6-month free trial, and you also get all the regular regular Prime benefits like free two-day shipping, streaming movies, music, and TV shows, and, of course, unlimited photo storage.

I first reviewed Amazon Cloud Drive as an option for backing up photos online when the new unlimited photos feature was launched. At the time, I was a little underwhelmed and found it a little gimmicky. My main criticisms related to the limitations for usefully managing large numbers of photos. In particular, as a Mac user, there was no Mac client for uploading photos, which meant that you really had to use the web browser, which just isn't well suited to large uploads.

But Amazon has been making improvements since then. There's a new upload client for Mac (there's been one for Windows for longer), and there have been tweaks to the web interface. The improvements have made a big difference, and I've changed my tune and have found that with these improvements Amazon Cloud Drive is now a much more viable option for backing up large amounts of photos--or, for that matter, any other files--online with a service that is safe, reliable, and cost-effective.

If you want to just dive in and try it out for yourself, here's the direct link. Otherwise, below's a quick overview of how it works and what it offers.

Please note that Amazon's services vary by region. I'm focussing here on the US Amazon, but the policies and plans in other regions such as the UK are different.

Uploading Photos to Amazon Prime Photos Through a Web Browser

The upload dialog is pretty straightforward. The most basic version is to use the web interface. You can drag and drop images onto the panel or browse for files or folders. To get the photo-specific viewing options, you can use JPG or TIFF files. You can also upload RAW files, but viewing them is limited to the embedded thumbnail, which isn't especially useful.

By default, your images are sorted by the date they were taken (the information is automatically extracted from the image file). You can also sort by upload date.

Uploading Photos Using Amazon Cloud Drive Client Sofware

The release of a Mac client for Amazon Cloud Drive Client has made a big difference in how useful the service is to me. The Windows client was released well before the Mac version, but for me, and for the many other photographers who use Mac, that wasn't especially useful.

The client itself is very straightforward. It's essentially a drop panel that you drop your folders or files onto, with the upload beginning automatically. There aren't any options like replace or sync or merge to be messing with. You can pause or cancel, but that's about it.

Once the upload starts you get a progress bar and it just goes about doing its thing.

If you get errors (for instance, trying to upload files larger than 2GB each), there'll be a notification in red and you can open a list of the offending files.

By itself, Amazon Cloud Drive clients don't offer synching and automated backup capabilities. But some third-party synching apps are starting to add Amazon Cloud Drive integration. Here are some of the early adopters I know about, and I expect this list will continue to grow.

Viewing Photos on Prime Photos

The image view through a web browser is clean and simple, with a dark grey background and the image's longest edge spanning that dimension. You get next and previous buttons overlaid on the sides. When you roll the cursor over the image you get icons at the bottom of the screen for the sharing link, download, and deleting.

Metadata

If you click on the ellipses (three dots) at the top right of the screen, you get a flyout displaying some image metadata. But it's pretty basic and includes only the filename, capture date, added date, file size, and pixel dimension. It doesn't include any embedded IPTC descriptions (or any other IPTC, EXIF, or XMP metadata), and you can't add captions, titles, or geotags.

Sharing

The share links are generated on the fly with randomized URLs. That enables you to be able to hit the Stop Sharing link to break the old URL to make it private again.

Apparently, you can only share images individually. There doesn't appear to be any way to share a folder or multiple images at once as a gallery.

Downloading

If you use the download link, it immediately downloads the original file. There are no options for choosing a resized version or specifying the image format.

Organizing

Amazon Cloud Drive is designed to work with most kinds of files, not just image files. To organize them, you can arrange them in the kind of folder structure you're familiar with. To move incoming files into folders, you can't drag and drop. Instead, you highlight them hit the Move link at the bottom of the screen. You'll then get a popup where you can choose the subfolder you want the files to move to. You can, however, change the sort order to make it more logical for whatever you're trying to do.

Smartphone App for Amazon Cloud Drive

There's a version of the free smartphone and tablet app for IOS and Android. It looks and works almost exactly like the website version. One thing that the smartphone app can do that the website version can't do, though, it automatically uploads any new photos you take on your phone (ie. the same as Dropbox's Camera Upload feature).

Limitations

Amazon Cloud Drive only supports files that are 2GB or smaller. That can be a problem if you're looking to back up videos or even high-resolution panorama photos.

Another limitation--although not necessarily a problem--is that the nature of this service doesn't have the kind of access flexibility that comes with something like Amazon S3. You can't mount your data as a drive or use it as the backend of a website or any of the myriad other ways you can use more full-featured cloud storage options. It is designed to be simple.

Wrap Up

So is Amazon's Prime Photos a good option for backing up photos?

When I first reviewed it after the initial rollout of the unlimited photos feature, I was underwhelmed. A lot of that had to do with the limited ways to deal with truly large numbers of files and folders. At the time, I regarded Dropbox Pro or extra storage in Google Drive as better options for many users, and they're still better options if you need things like automation or versioning.

But with the addition of two things I've changed my tune. One is that Amazon now offers an Unlimited Everything plan for photos, videos, files, and documents. It's good value and makes it directly competitive with automatic backup services like Backblaze or CrashPlan (although, it should be noted, Amazon Cloud Drive does not currently have built-in automatic backup). The other is the addition of the Mac app, which makes uploading large numbers of files much more viable. The Mac app isn't perfect--it's very basic, and from time to time I have it stall on me (fixed by hitting pause and then resume), but it makes a big difference for dealing with folders and large numbers of images. There have also been some other incremental improvements that have helped.

One thing to be careful of if you're using the Prime Photos plan (rather than the Unlimited Everything plan) is that it is quite strict about file types. You can upload as many images as you like, but all other file types are counted against your regular 5GB quote. That includes video files, sidecar XMP files, or any other kind of files. If you want to save those as well and have a lot of them, a better bet might be the Unlimited Everything plan.

So after experimenting a lot more with it, I've now signed up with the Unlimited Everything plan and am using it in my mix of the cloud backup options that I use for some of my personal files.

But if you're a professional photographer, there's an important catch in using Amazon Cloud Drive as part of your business: the Amazon Cloud Drive terms of service limit your usage to personal, non-commercial use. Some of the language seems more geared towards preventing users from creating online services or client galleries with it rather than strictly as a data backup service, but so that you can make your own interpretation on whether your intended use falls within the allowed terms of service, here's the actual language (you can confirm the latest version here):

1.2 Using Your Files with the Service. You may use the Service only to store, retrieve, manage, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service.

While I was initially intrigued by the idea of using it to backup my images, I've now scaled back my usage to personal photos and oodles of other non-business files of all different types I have. That's still a lot of data, and so far so good.

There's nothing inherently bad about using Prime Photo or Amazon Cloud Drive for photo backups--at least, no more so than relying on other commercial entities to keep your images safe--especially if it's used in combination with local backups on hard drives or other physical media. Since Amazon provides the online infrastructure for so many of the web's sites and services, it's hard to imagine a safer place for them online. So long as you continue paying your membership fees, of course. Cloud storage companies can and do disappear in the face of business realities--like Digital Railroad in 2008 or BigStash in 2015--but Amazon has proven to be one of the most reliable and stable players in the space thus far.

If you already have Amazon Prime membership, you already have access to the Unlimited Photos feature as a free part of your membership. You can find more information here.

If you don't currently have Amazon Prime membership, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial here.

Or if you're a student, you can sign up for a free 6-month trial that you can then convert to a paid account at a 50% discount rate with a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/student/signup/info/?ref_=assoc_tag_ph_1402130811706&_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=pf4&tag=0506-promo-rev-20&linkId=ffa6fd224f65fe5e8e0cbb4386040b4c" rel="nofollow" title="Affiliate link target="_blank">student membership.

If you're not a Prime member and don't want to be, you can also purchase Prime Photos as an a la carte option, with 100GB or 1TB plans. If 1TB isn't enough, you can buy extra multiples of 1TB to add on.

Disclosure: Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. What that means is that, at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase. You can find further details here.

News & Deals

Some recent news and deals that have caught my eye.

Ricoh GR III available for pre-order. Ricoh has formally announced the GR III, the latest in their GR series of minimalist street shooters. On paper, it’s not a massive upgrade over the GR II, but there are some useful improvements. Highlights include: 24.2MP APS-C CMOS sensor, GR Engine 6, built-in shake reduction, and a trimmed down body. It still has a 28mm ƒ/2.8 lens (35mm equivalent). The back screen is now a touchscreen, and it has Bluetooth and wifi connectivity as well as a USB-C port. It’s priced at $899 with an expected availability of March 18. I’ve ordered one and will be posting a hands-on review when I’ve had a chance to do some shooting with it. You can preorder now from B&H Photo.

New gear announcements: Nikon 24-70mm ƒ/2.8 for Z mirrorless system; Fujifilm X-T30 APS-C mirrorless camera; Canon EOS RP full-frame mirrorless camera. Nikon has announced a new 24-70mm ƒ/2.8 for their new full-frame mirrorless ecosystem. It’s priced at $2,2297 and available for pre-order now. Canon has announced a new entry-level full-frame mirrorless camera with a 26.2MP sensor and 4K video for a very competitive $1299 (body only) or $2200 with a 24-105mm lens. It’s available for pre-order now, with expected availability at the end of February.. And Fujifilm is releasing a stripped-down version of the X-T3 in a smaller and lighter package, which they’re calling the X-T30, priced at $899 (body only). Preorders for it open at noon on February 15 at B&H Photo.

$1400 off the LaCie 2TB Bolt 3 Thunderbolt 3 External SSD. With this special blowout deal, B&H has $1400 off the superfast external SSD drive with dual Thunderbolt 3 ports. It brings it down to a very attractive $599. Find it here.

$200 off the Nikon D850. For the first time the D850 is on sale, with $200 off at B&H, bringing it down to $3096.95 for the body. Includes SanDisk 64GB Extreme Pro SD card, a shoulder bag, and free expedited shipping. Find the deal here.

$100 off HERO7 Black or Fusion with new TradeUp deal. GoPro has launched a new trade up deal for the HERO7 Black and Fusion cameras where you get $100 by trading in any old GoPro or digital camera in any condition, whether it’s working or not. There are very few restrictions: the original retail price of the camera was at least $99.99 and the delivery has to be in the US. GoPro even covers the cost of shipping your old camera in as well as 2-day shipping with the new camera. The deal is only available on GoPro.com–you can find it here.

New Olympus OM-D E-M1X Rugged and Fast Micro Four Thirds Pro Camera. Olympus has announced their new OM-D E-M1X, a Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera that is weather sealed and fast, making it a very attractive option for wildlife, sports, and adventure travel photography. It’s not small–it has a built-in vertical grip that also gives extra battery space–but it looks like it’ll stand up well to the rigors of adventuring with a rugged body. It has a 20MP Micro Four Thirds sensor, Olympus’s latest image processing engine, built-in sensor stabilization, and a nifty-sounding autofocus system that recognizes more than faces. It looks like just the ticket for my next trip to Antarctica; stay tuned for my hands-on review. The body is $3000, and it’s available for preorder now at B&H Photo with expected availability on Feburary 25.

Sony a6400 Mirrorless Camera. Sony has announced the new Alpha a6400 mirrorless camera. It has a 24.2MP APS-C sensor and a raft new of new upgrades over the a6300 while still keeping the same form factor and general approach. There are three options: body only ($898), with a 16-50mm lens ($998), or with a 18-135mm lens ($1298). Now available for preorder at B&H Photo.

1TB SD cards are hitting the market. After some corporate tumult in recent years, Lexar is signaling its revival by launching the first consumer 1TB SD card. It’s rated for V30 and is in its long-standing 633x Lexar Professional range. You can pre-order from B&H for $399.99.

Nikon D750 body for $1297. Presumably clearing out stock to make way for a new model, the Nikon D750 is heavily discounted at $700 off, down to $1297. Also includes a spare battery, shoulder bag, and memory card. You can find it here.

FujiFilm X-T2 and X-T3 savings. There are some great savings to be had on the X-T2 and X-T3 at the moment. There are various bundles with different savings amounts, but as some examples, you can get the X-T2 body with hand grip kit for $1208 (which is $500 off), the X-T2+18-55mm lens kit for $1608 ($400 off), and $100 off the X-T3 body.

New firmware for FujiFilm X-T3. FujiFilm has released v.2.00 of the firmware for the X-T3. It adds some new video features, including: “the ability to record 4K HDR video in Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) format, bringing it up-to-date with the latest HDR technology. In addition, the X-T3 will be able to record Film Simulation and F-log footage simultaneously, and videographers will be able to record more than 4GB of footage in one shot. Further upgrades include the display of color temperature (kelvin) on the EVF and LCD, along with support for slower DCI 4K and 4K shutter speeds of 29.97p, 25p, 24p, and 23.98p.” You can find the new firmware here.

Ricoh GR III sticks with APS-C sized sensor. According to an interview with a Ricoh executive, the GR III won’t have a full-frame sensor because of concerns about compromises that would have to be made, particularly with lens quality. So the upcoming GR III will be sticking with the APS-C sized sensor of previous models. Early leaks of what is presumably a prototype suggest it looks basically identical to the GR II. As a GR fan myself, I’m looking forward to this one. Top of my wishlist is better low-light performance, although it looks like the new model is sticking with the ƒ/2.8 maximum aperture rather than something faster but does bump up available ISO to 102400.

Photos of a village in western Spain by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto. The New York Times Lens section features some beautiful large-format images by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto from his decades-long project to capture his ancestral village of Cespedosa in western Spain. You can see them here.

DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal announced. This tiny, stabilized, 4K camera has some really interesting features, especially compared to something like the new GoPro HERO7 Black. Both shoot 4K60 stabilized footage, but while the HERO7 Black relies on electronic stabilization (which does, admittedly, work well in this case), the DJI uses a real gimbal that comes in the form of a built-in handle grip. The DJI offers higher bitrates of up to 100 Mb/s (compared to a max of 78Mb/s on the GoPro), and has various tracking modes. For stills, it can shoot both JPG and RAW (DNG) and also has time-lapse, motionlapse, nightshot, and panoramic modes. They’re priced at $349 and available now at B&H Photo. And stay tuned for my hands-on review.

Google Images now displaying Copyright and Credit status. When it’s available in IPTC. They’ve been doing something like this for large images for a while, but they’ve tweaked the system again.

New #1 Fastest SD Card. There’s a new #1 fastest SD card in my speed tests: the ProGrade Digital V90 card. It edges out the previous fastest from Sony. You can find details here. I’ve also added some new SanDisk cards to the

Ricoh GRIII in development. Ricoh’s GR series cameras have something of a cult following as small, high-quality cameras with a lot of options for control–a no-frills compact without some of the bells and whistles that can become distractions. I routinely put a GRII in my pack when I’m traveling. They’ve now finally (!) announced the new version, the GRIII. There’s much that sounds like it will share quite a lot of specs with the older model–an APS-C sized CMOS sensor, magnesium alloy body, a 28mm (equivalent) ƒ/2.8 lens. But the new model will have a redesigned lens, new sensor, and new imaging engine. It’s scheduled to be launched in early 2019.

New Nikon 500mm ƒ/5.6E VR lens. Smaller and lighter. Sports and wildlife photographers will appreciate the smaller size and lighter weight of this new super-telephoto prime from Nikon. The magic ingredient that allows for the smaller footprint is apparently that it uses a “Phase Fresnel element.” It’s designed for FX format, has an aperture range of ƒ/5.6 to ƒ/32, weighs a bit over 3 pounds, and has built-in VR. It’s available for pre-order here for $3600.

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Comments

Amazon Photos is full of cool features but there is something really annoying about it: it takes ages to back up the photos, what has become a deal breaker for me. It takes about 1 hour to upload only 50 photos (what takes only a couple seconds using Google Drive, Dropbox or WeTransfer).

I have Prime Membership, largely because of this cloud backup service. However, I'm happily backing up my photos and I get an alert on screen, to tell me that my hard drive storage space is low when I knew that I had approximately 150 Gb free. I ring Amazon to discover that a duplicate of my files is being made on my hard drive. What this means is that if you want to back up 100Gb worth of photos that you already have on your local drive, Amazon duplicates the files to use up another 100GB of local storage as well as saving a copy to the cloud. So, if you want unlimited storage at Amazon, you can't simply dump image files to Amazon without having twice the storage Amazon has, at home! I thought this can't be right but, Amazon confirmed this over the telephone to me yesterday. In it's current state, Amazon Drive/Prime Photos is not practical due to this mad mad mad configuration!

Actually, you can use the 'Backup" option just to backup your files, and this will not duplicate files at all. It will backup everything to Amazon Cloud not duplicating any files on your local storage. Duplication occurs when you use "Sync". This will duplicate your files to the Amazon folder that is created when you install Amazon Drive in your machine. So if you don't want to duplicate files and just want to make a backup of your files to Amazon Cloud, use the "Backup" feature. If you want to backup and sync your files to Amazon Cloud at the same time, then use the "Sync" feature. Just have in mind that when you use the "Sync" option, if you delete or modify a file from your local storage, it will also be deleted or modify in Amazon Drive, and vice versa.

This is exactly what i'm trying to figure out as well and would love to know the answer.

I'm running a backup on the Amazon Drive app on my MacBook Pro. I'm hoping that the photos and videos are copies over to my Prime Photos account. If that is the case, can I delete the photos from my computer and still have then remain in Prime Photos?

I have many photos and videos, around 236GB or so. I downloaded the Windows Cloud Drive Sync app on my server and let it rip. I used a mirror copy of my 236GB to another directory because I didn't want this app touching the original source.

Overall the app didn't give me a good warm fuzzy that it was syncing everything that it should be. I had several errors that I had to "retry". Sometimes I'll go back after a couple of hours and the login screen has re-appeared, showing the "wait" spinner on the right panel, spinning forever and ever. I would have to kill the app and restart it to get a login prompt and start syncing again. Nevertheless, I persisted.

At some point in time I tried the "upload with syncing" command- which is supposed to just upload withing "syncing", I suppose a sort-of one-way upload. This started to work for a while but then got the login/spinner situation again. Also after doing this I now see that my mirrored copy of my media is for some reason blank, most of the files are gone! Good thing I didn't sync off of my main source!

I was hoping for a simple yet robust piece of software that I could run in the background on my Windows Server that would "just work", something that would take whatever additions I have in my media directory and upload them to the cloud drive. This application I didn't feel was up to prime time. I have not checked out the other syncing programs mentioned in this article, maybe they work better.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I've been meaning to check back in with Amazon Cloud Drive and update this post--it was originally posted quite some time ago--and I'll be on the lookout for the issues you mention.

I just started using Amazon Cloud Drive to backup the thousands of photos we have on my PC. I uploaded some yesterday and noticed that on some pics I lose the image quality. Some pics become blurry. Is there a reason for this and is there a fix for it.

I suspect what you're seeing are just the low-resolution preview versions that are being generated on Amazon's end. They should improve as better previews get generated. Your original files should remain exactly as they were, and to check you can download the original master file to take a look.

We were using Prime Photos and were happy with it when in 5/2017, we realized that >5,000 pictures and videos from 2014-2015 went missing, which had been there in 3/2017. We contacted Amazon by email of the problem, then they told us to call them regarding the issue. We did this and they said that they would look into it. Approximately 2 weeks later, I called again and it turns out no one has even started looking into the issue since a ticket # for the request was never submitted. We are devastated since the photos are from 2014-2015 in my daughter's first year of life. I am upset that the photos are lost, but even more upset that I have received no explanation or answers from Amazon about this. I have no way to hold them accountable for not providing the paid service that they promised. Don't trust Amazon Prime Photo with your photos.

I know it probably isn't helpful to hear this now, but you need to maintain multiple backups of important, can't lose files/photos. The cloud is a great option, but I recommend getting a NAS for home, and/or at least a couple external harddrives for additional copies. I hope they're able to get your data back, but never trust only one copy!

That's only part of the truth. The point is that Amazon with its bulletproof redundancy systems actually had Brittany missing files, but that they considered not worth the database admin effort to recover them , although they lied she: "they said that they would look into it". Obviously redundancy for so loved files should be first of all a client task, but that somewhat introduced a vicious detail of discharge at Amazon side, afterall the word class reliable professionals of data preservation. Ps. Untortunatelly I am on Brittany circunstances and I feel scarce chances of get them back and even fewer of start paying for such a lame dehumanized service after the try period.

what would you recommed to use for business photography files? I am also afraid of Amazon Cloud due to fact that commercial is not allowed. I need just as simple as Amazon Cloud, and unlimited storage. Any suggestions?

I've not run into that issue myself, but I've also been meaning to update this page--it was originally posted when the service was first launched, and there have been many updates since then. I'll add this issue to the list of things to investigate.

Thanks for your great review. It got me to give Amazon Prime Photos a try, and I am happy with it.

Just as an update: You mention in your review that there didn't seem to be a way to share multiple photos at once as a sort of gallery. This seems to have changed. There is now the concept of "albums" as collections of photos, which can be shared.

I have the prime photos app on my iphone and the amazon drive on my laptop, I am logged in under my same account however neither is showing the other photos that have been uploaded to the Amazon Prime Photos. Is there a way to combine them so I can see the images I upload from my phone on my computer and vice versa? I just want to house them in one place but be able to access all of the photos from either device. Any help?

Can this be used as an archive / backup. Can I just park a bunch of folders with photos and leave them . Folders with no synch to a phone or desktop with no concern that they will be deleted. I was a happy crash plan user until recently when they deleted the data from a machine that hadn't backed up in some time. Could this happen with Cloud drive or would I be better off with something like Glacier? Thanks

You can use it independently of sync. So long as you keep the subscription paid up, they won't get deleted automatically as they might with some other services that rely on sync and regular connection. You might also find some ideas in my post on backing up to the cloud.

I just wanted to add that if you like Amazon Drive but would like sync functionality there is a product called oDrive that will do this. My personal favorite feature is that it can automatically unsync local content after a specified period (1 day, 1 week, 1 month). So if you want to process a folder of images you can sync them and the following day your local space will be freed up without intervention. Changes you make to the folder are automatically synced. I'm not affiliated with the company, just like the product so far and it makes Amazon Drive a better alternative to Google Drive in my case.

Not sure if I'm just an idiot... I downloaded and started using Amazon photos in lieu of hooking my phone up and uploading my pictures to my computer. I thought the point of amazon photos was to act like a cloud storage system which (I thought) would free up storage on my phone. Now I'm finding the app eats up a lot of storage so I might as well just go back to the old system. Is the app supposed to eat up so much storage? Or am I using it wrong?

Sounds like you are probably using it wrong. Once you install the app it doesn't (shouldn't) send all your pictures to the cloud and delete those that are taking up space on your phone. You still likely manually have to do that. Once you're certain it's backed up to the cloud, you can then delete the device copy to free up space. If/when you view the picture in the app, you can then redownload it back. I highly recommend having multiple backups of important data before trusting it off to the cloud.

Has anyone noticed that Amazon seems to bump up the saturation on their images? I did a side-by-side comparison with google+'s Photos feature and there is definitely something going on. I didn't see any settings to correct it either.

I tried today to upload a couple of .psd files by Amazon Cloud Drive Windows client but I have got each time a message "Account over quota". Can you please explain? I have a Cloud Drive for photographs subscription and PSD it is a photo file type (it is still possible to upload PSD files by internet browser).

Thanks for the article. One limitation with the iOS app is the inability (as far as I can see) to clear the cache from the app (other than deleting and reinstalling the app itself). For every photo I view on my iPhone within the app it uses up about 2mb of storage on my phone. For someone with a small amount of storage space this can be problematic. The only way to clear the cache down would be to remove the app and reinstall it to the phone. I phoned Amazon about creating the ability to clear the cache on the iOS app (similar to how it is done on iOS Safari) and they said they'd add it to the user request list (not holding my breath).

Seems to be a problem with most photo cloud storage apps however.

Would love to find an app where I can view thousands of historical photos stored in the cloud without consuming any storage on my phone (or at least with an easy way to clear the cache it uses).

I am a Prime member using cloud storage. I store my photos in manually made directories, nested, with dates, events, etc, inside the My Picture directory on my Windows PC. I use the Amazon Cloud desktop app to upload all of the pictures and directories. Prime Cloud storage is now automatically making a duplicate of these pictures and directories under the "Cloud Drive" Directory that it created when I downloaded the desktop app. I now have duplicates of every picture on my C drive. I also have Amazon Cloud on my iPad and cell phones and pictures taken on those devices are automatically uploaded into the Cloud. These same pictures are now automatically being downloaded on my PC in the "Cloud Drive" directory. How can I stop Amazon Cloud from automatically backing up every photo in the Cloud onto my C drive?

The current version of the Amazon Drive desktop software does (again?) include sync. It allows you even to select folders that should be included in sync, and to deselect those folders to freeze them in time.

I decided to backup my photos/videos external drive onto the Amazon (I'm a Prime member) and just found out about the "other file" storage issue. Aside from this, my gripe is that the thumbnails can't be rotated.

The fact that I can't upload iPhoto files or Aperture photos by themselves makes it useless. I don't have time to open up the 40,000 photos I have by project and drag and drop. It's useless for me from that sense. Moving on.

Hey, just wanted to give my feedback. I have a directory roughly 250G. It is a mix of mostly pictures (by count), but also videos, powerpoints,etc). * There IS a mac version of the desktop version - this may be new and I use a PC so didn't actually use it * The upload went overnight and is still going. 19G transferred in ~12 hours. * I have run out of "other" storage space. the 153 files that didn't get uploaded are all non-pictures. Things are still being transferred even though I am out of "other" space, the pictures are still going up.

So, so far, good and exactly what I expected. I may consider upgrading to the everything plan, but I wish they would give Prime members a discount.

Thanks for your note. Yes, they've added a Mac client since I originally looked at it, and I've been taking another look at it now. Along with some other tweaks since I last used it, it makes a big difference, and I'll be updating this post sometime this week based on that.

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Amazon has published API for the Cloud Drive, so it's only a matter of time until apps fill the unsatisfied needs.

Already, there's a command line utility acd_cli https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli that allows command line access to the drive. Just played with it a bit, and it's quite usable for batch uploads and downloads from anywhere there's python3 (here you go, Mac people). With just a little bit of scripting you could do automatic syncing.

With the published API and unlimited storage I think this thing is very promising.

Coming from a former Prime member who had no knowledge of the Cloud's involuntary upload of over 1,000 of my personal images(duplicate and triplicate copies, genealogy research, personal documents, scans and things as useless as memes/wallpapers) all taken from a family PC, not ONE of them with my consent or knowledge; I can assure you not everyone is happy about this. Upon receiving the email today I was informed that one of the packages had already been chosen for me and that I have a limited amount of time to choose and buy one or be billed for the one Amazon chose.(exactly which one was not disclosed to me)

I already have a free unlimited cloud service, I choose what to save and I'm aware when it's doing so. I had no idea Amazon had been taking pictures from my PC, some of which belong to other family members. They're not ordered by date. In fact, they're all in one lump folder whose only title is "No Date". 1,000 images and 4.9GB's of the originally free 5.0GB's is still unused. I haven't once given consent regarding, been notified of or made aware that my PC storage was being accessed. I didn't opt-in to the service, I was simply a Prime member at the time it was introduced, nowhere did it state that I had to use it. I was completely unaware Amazon had a single picture of mine.

I'm not sure yet whether I'll be able to delete the pictures and find out how it's been accessing my files, prior to today I've never even opened the storage space and have never downloaded the Cloud on any device. $11.99 for 5GB? Fine if you're interested, not so much if you're not and have just realized your privacy, along with your family's, has been invaded.

Amazon must have just magically uploaded all of your photos then. What sounds likely is that you had the software installed and logged in. I installed the software for uploading on windows and it is very obvious what you choose to upload and what you choose not to. You can hardly claim you didn't opt-in if you accepted something without reading it.

I'm using Amazon Cloud Drive to dump folders all of my RAW files as soon as I get back from photo shoots (after importing them into Lightroom and converting to DNG). This workflow keeps my video files separate, plus it maintains the folder names I'm using on my editing machine. I've also uploaded a PSD file that was 2.3 GB and it didn't have any issues (not sure if there's some wiggle room on the 2 GB file limitation, but it seems so). The service isn't perfect by any means (the lack of syncing is probably my biggest issue with it), but if you are already an Amazon Prime member I'd say it's certainly worth checking out. It's unlimited photo storage! Go for it, I'd say. Even if it's just one more place to back files up, a little bit more peace of mind is always a good thing.

One advantage for a noob like me is that Cloud Drive photos works nicely with Amazon Fire Stick and/or Fire TV.

Try to run Picasa pictures to your Chromecast... not possible except for casting though a Chrome browser.

I have Google Picasa as my main cloud storage option but the inability (insanity rather) of not having Google's Chromecast integrated with Google's Picasa makes Amazon Cloud Drive a very interesting option

Great post, thank you! I am also a Prime member that decided to take the cloud storage for a spin. Very quickly I ran into the issue of fairly small video files interspersed with my photo files, and my drive is now full. I store my photos in manually made directories, nested, with dates, events, etc, inside of directories named by year and month on my Windows home server desktop. so it's pretty impossible for me to exclude the videos from uploading, so I'll have to call this experiment a dud. Also, I have noticed that whole bunches and bunches of photos that were properly sorted into the year they belong in, with correct dates, have ended up in "no date" classification on Amazon, with no way to edit. As my photo collection is now at about 75,000 total, it's really not feasible to try to tweak things. I'm sticking with PictureLife and crashplan for now.

I can imagine it sucks if you have it cataloged this way. A few years back, I started making separate structures for pictures and video, going by year, and then within each folder, going by month number. (I also now have a "b-roll" for pictures structured similarly, so a lot of pictures I doubt anyone else care looking at, or 14 other variations of a photo, goes into that structure). I do all my work in lightroom, and recently started converting all my various raw format files to dng, so they will upload fine to Amazon cloud. It takes a while to upload, since the last few years, with higher resolution raw files, we are easily talking 10GB for a single month! I think it is a fantastic benefit to Prime to have this unlimited storage. As someone else mentioned, I only wish it did some kind of sync'ing perhaps through Lightroom itself, so if I decide to move pictures around, it would change appropriately in the cloud too.

As an existing Amazon Instant Video subscriber, I decided to sign up for full on Prime, in order to take advantage of the Prime Photos offering.

I have been using Amazon Cloud Drive for a few days now and have encountered a number of issues, which I wondered if you has also come across?

1) Upload speeds. Have seen very slow upload speeds. Loading about 10k (17GB) photos has so far taken several days. Still not complete (- see item 3)

2) Upload failure. Have twice now left the upload (via Web App (See item 3)) running overnight, only to return to it in the morning and discover it has 'failed', without explanantion.

3) Abandoned use of Desktop app now, having discovered it does not upload all photos. It complete the upload of all folders on my machine, but not all files in those folders! For example, I had 1937 photos in a folder dated 2005, but the Desktop app only identifies and picks up 1818 of them. When I select the same folder in the Web app, it identifies 1937.

Good job I checked!

4) Using the Web app now, only to find it fails mid upload, rendering my ability to browse the internet defunct! I then have to refresh Winsock to get any browsers to successfully load a web page.

5) I did try loading via 5 distinct web app tabs to see if this would run any faster, but all five failed after about half an hour.

6) Individual files 'fail' to load due to 'error'. These are reported back by Amazon, but no reason is given for the failure, or the folder in which they reside.

7) Not all files load successfully. The numbers loaded successfully are reported back, but no clue as to which files did not, or the location of the unsuccessful files.

Thank you for the suggestion. I thought Amazon Primes is the best solution for me since they have this offer £39 per year and i get the Prime membership benefits plus unlimited photo storage. That means I get the Instant Prime Videos and the fast delivery as well. Isn't that good enough? But, Im curious for what happens in the second year. The price offered is an offer price (50% off) so that means I might need to pay £78 per year starting year 2. Which will be £6.50 per month and almost the same with Google Drive. Also what happen if I decided to cancel my membership in the middle of the first year? will they delete all my photos? please give me your opinion this. Thank you and Merry Christmas!

I don't know what Amazon does with your images if you cancel Prime. My guess is that you'll lose access to the images and they'll be deleted at some later point. But I've not investigated to see whether that is actually their policy.

If you remove your prime it will convert to a $11.99 per year subscription. I suspect you wont have access to those photos if you refuse to pony up the yearly fee, just like any other service you stop paying for.

Thank you for writing this! I just found out about the free Prime Photos on Amazon and am trying it out myself. I'm using it to store old photos taken with my "point and shoot" eons ago. That will free up a bit of space on my hard drive for my current RAW files :) I'll be checking out your other backup recommendations too. I'm glad to have found your site - I'll be reading often :)

I'm not aware of any direct Lightroom Publish Service for Amazon Cloud Drive, but if you're on a PC and running the Amazon Cloud Drive desktop client, you can create a Lightroom Publish Service to a designated folder on your hard drive that's watched by the Cloud Drive client. I'm assuming that the desktop client has an automatic background synching feature (I haven't confirmed this).

The desktop app (at least the Windows version I have used) does in fact sync folders on the desktop.

I have set up my Lightroom workflow to import my Olympus raw files (*.ORF, not recognized as photos by Amazon Cloud Drive) directly from camera to a folder structure that is mapped to the Amazon Cloud Drive. In the same process, I let Lightroom convert the photo to *.DNG, which DOES get recognized as an image file.

I plan to keep the folders syncing, until I am done editing the raw files. After that, I will disable sync on those folders that are "done", to avoid inadvertent deletion.

Here’s an important question: Just how large are the thumbnail image files that are automatically downloaded to your iOS device when you install the Cloud Drive app? The full size image or video has to be manually selected to be downloaded to the iOS device (assuming it came from a different device or computer), but with 160g of images that I’ll be uploading from my Mac, I’m concerned about storage space issues. I know that I don’t have to use the iOS app, and have turned off the auto-upload feature, but am still concerned about space on the iOS devices. And yes, I’m a professional Mac tech and my images are backed up locally, so I’m not relying on Cloud Drive as the sole location for any files.

I'm in the middle of a huge upload to Cloud Drive from my Mac via the web interface, but it appears that the thumbnail images for each of my 1020 photos and 14 videos are roughly 20 KB each, in my case for a total iPhone cache of 20 MB from the current total online storage of 5 GB. The iOS app does allow management of this cache, with the options to clear completely, or limit the maximum size to 500 MB, 1 GB or 2 GB. This is all still a guess at this early stage, looking at information on the iOS app.

Awesome review, I feel the same way. My biggest issue is not being able to exclude certain files, like video files, when I start an upload because my cloud storage keeps filling up with all of the videos inside of my photo library. And it also slows down the uploading of all the photos that I do want to upload. Being a Prime member it's great to have an essentially free cloud backup option for my photos & RAW files, with the RAW storage being possibly the biggest advantage. But other than that the actual process of doing all the uploading has been kind of a pain.

This was my biggest problem. My photos and videos are intermingled with no easy way to sort them out. What I ended up doing is creating a samba share on my linux file server that excludes everything but the image files. So far it is working great. My post from the amazon forum:

This is not for everybody, it is a workaround for advanced users. Hopefully Amazon will improve its Cloud Drive uploader to save its customers grief so this workaround is not needed.

I am a prime member and wanted to use Amazon Cloud Drive as an additional free backup (I already use Crashplan as a main backup). Unfortunately, there is no way to filter what you wabt to upload (only images). Other files will upload and use up your allotted non-free space. If you are full it will reject the file, and it will continue to upload non-images and reject them. In my case this was many, many gigabytes of video interspersed with my photos. You can't even filter the non-image files on the web site to delete them. Because of these severe limitations I gave up on using it until this morning, when an idea hit me. I have all my data on a linux file server, so I can configure a samba share that veto's all files but images, so the Cloud Drive app can't even see the files it cant use.